Aaron McElroy: 200 and something Notes

The gallery is pleased to announce 200 and something Notes – the New York solo debut of Brooklyn-based Aaron McElroy. The exhibition will be on view in the Back Gallery concurrently with Echo Eggebrecht’s Probably Science, which will be on view in the Front Gallery.

McElroy’s collection of 7×5 inch photographs tacked to the walls of the gallery from floor to ceiling features hazy visual fragments of the artist’s life arranged to provoke a particular atmosphere. Intimate moments between the photographer and vulnerable, exposed human subjects; banal surfaces and materials of youthful, domestic life; and the straightforward appearance of the photographic flash are motifs found throughout McElroy’s images. Juxtaposed as they are, the atmosphere that McElroy creates is alluring in its relaxed mingling of softly modeled body contours and tenderly composed detritus.

Seldom slipping into abstraction or ambiguity, the candid, often erotic, images transmit the sincere pleasure of the basic, voyeuristic photographic process of being seduced by a vision, shooting it, and seizing it. And though the images are like personal snapshots in their resulting intimacy and unpretentiousness, each shot is specifically chosen, each print painstakingly printed, and each grouping carefully edited. To McElroy, his project is about these intuitive aesthetic processes more so than about leaving his individual images subject to excessive conceptual or theoretical interpretations. McElroy says in an interview about his work, “I try to take random images and then [create] a stream of ideas with them.”

The excitement of physical encounter, capture, and gratification that is vital to McElroy’s project evidences his stated interest in street photographers such as Daido Moriyama and Araki, while his blend of commercial seduction with artistic experimentation finds its roots in Man Ray’s fashion photography. As an installation, intimate details and expansive atmospheric impressions operate together to create a captivating, fluid movement from moment to moment, thought to thought, and sensation to sensation.

Aaron McElroy (b. 1978) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He graduated from New England School of Photography. He has been featured in exhibitions at FOAM Photography Museum, Amsterdam, Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY, and Chelsea Art Museum, New York, NY; among others.